Caught.net would be negligent if we didn't applaud the retiring Judge Fortunato for assisting social causes in his retirement!

Complaint 1:

While Caught respects any judge who seeks to correct themselves,
read this complaint and decide if Judge Fortunato acted
appropriately. [Reported in The Providence Journal on
3-26-99] The RI Supreme Court said Judge Fortunato erred and
was "clearly wrong" when he overturned his own finding of guilt in
the rape trial of Monsignor Louis Ward Dunn. Judge
Fortunato had said he learned from 80-90 letters sent after the
trial that the Monsignor's lawyer [a former Supreme Court law
clerk] was inexperienced in felony cases. Judge Fortunato
had praised this same lawyer when he found the Monsignor
guilty and this same lawyer had won the first case against the
Monsignor. Judge Fortunato said the letters disclosed a
"treasure trove" of information regarding the Monsignor's character
which should have been explored at trial. The RI Supreme
Court said:

Judge Fortunato , in contravention of court rules, had
improperly raised on his own the question of the Monsignor Dunn's
attorney's competency merely on the basis of "unverified and
unreliable" information he received in letters written by "unknown
persons." Judge Fortunato "should have refrained from
injecting himself into what was then clearly an adversarial
proceeding before him, and from assuming for himself a position and
burden of proof that rightfully belonged only to the
defendant."

[Note: the RI Supreme Court has repeatedly held that
claims of ineffective counsel cannot even be entertained by a trial
judge until after a defendant appeals his or her conviction to the
Supreme Court and the appeal is denied. Also, the
Monsignor never questioned or complained about his lawyer and
neither did a substitute lawyer involved in the case.] The RI
Supreme Court continued saying,

"Court rules preclude a trial justice from [on his or her
own] raising and considering his or her own grounds for vacating a
previous judgment. When a trial justice does so, he
or she effectively transforms what had previously been the
defendant's motion for a new trial into the trial justice's motion
for a new trial and serves to preclude the trial justice from
ruling on his or her own motion. Judge Fortunato erred in
considering and ruling upon a motion that was no longer truly
that of the defendant as required by court rules."

Caught note: In 1999, Rhode Island Superior Court
Associate Justice Stephen J. Fortunato Jr. published a law review
article in which he argued that judges who are subjected to false
attacks on their decisions or their character ought to be free to
defend themselves publicly. As Judge Fortunato himself
recognized, however, he was advocating an extreme minority
position.

Complaint Two

[4-26-2001] While this complaint does not involve
judicial misconduct, Caught felt the public could learn from it
because Judge Fortunato's logic fell short...again. In a
April 6, 2001 Providence Journal op-ed piece, "Stealing newspapers
for free speech," Professor David Estlund from Brown University
argued that the Brown students who took copies of the Brown Daily
Herald were not violating the First Amendment, and that their
actions were not censorship, though Professor Estlund left open the
question whether the acts were justified. In an April 13
response, "Censorship by any other name is still . . . .," Stephen
J. Fortunato Jr., a Rhode Island Superior Court judge, offered
several arguments against the Brown professor.
Judge Fortunato says that it would be contrary to free speech to
suppress a message simply "because it annoys or disturbs a person
or group." He says the students were implicitly saying that, "we
have the right to decide no one else should read the ad." The
Horowitz ad was not in the edition of the Herald that the
students took, but had already appeared in the Herald several days
before. Since suppression of the Horowitz message was apparently
neither the intention nor the effect of their action, Judge
Fortunato's condemnation of suppressing annoying or offensive
messages misses its mark.

Complaint Three

Janice Scarpetti wrote in the Providence Journal editorial
page that "...every time Judge Fortunato presides over a sex crime
case, the criminal gets either a suspended or very light
sentence..." Janice felt Judge Fortunato should step down or
not preside over this kind of case.

Complaint Four

Inappropriate mingling of religion and justice system in Rhode
Island March 5, 2004

The Rhode Island judicial system is not based on any religious
faith or creed, nor was it ever intended to be, but one would never
know this from recent actions and statements by Chief Justice Frank
J. Williams of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and state Atty. Gen.
Patrick C. Lynch as reported in The Journal and elsewhere.
On Feb. 23, Attorney General Lynch presided over an
interdenominational convocation at the First Baptist Church in
America to honor former attorneys general. Along with religious
leaders, the attorney general and Chief Justice Williams spoke at
this event. In replying to criticisms that judicial officials were
becoming improperly entangled with a religious ceremony and
religious proselytizing, Mr. Lynch responded with medieval
casuistry: "This is not about faith driving the office -- it's
about faith supporting the office . . .".
Judge Williams has spoken even more starkly about religious faith
and the responsibilities of the judicial office. "Without faith,
you're dead," blared the headline in the Feb. 5 Providence Visitor,
the official newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rhode
Island. These words of Judge Williams precede a lengthy and
laudatory article about his religious beliefs and
commitments.
Among other things, the judge declared "The United States was
founded on Judeo-Christian principles." He then merged his theology
with his foreign policy: "We need to have that same faith today as
we face the war on terror."
>From a spokesman for the attorney general, Michael J. Healy, we
learn that Mr. Lynch has the "belief that justice incorporates all
faiths." We also learn from Mr. Healy that Attorney General Lynch
has concluded that "the three great monotheistic religions --
Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- form the basis of the
criminal-justice system."
This is dangerous territory into which the attorney general and the
chief justice intrude as they breach the "hedge or wall" that Roger
Williams said must separate church and state. The pronouncement
that one needs a religious faith and that without it one is "dead"
is a theological opinion, not a legal one. Liberty of conscience
permits anyone to hold any faith they wish, but judicial officers
should not proclaim their views from a church pulpit provided to
them solely because they hold public office. Does anyone believe
that if Frank J. Williams and Patrick C. Lynch were private
citizens who did not hold important statewide appointed and
elective offices, they would be invited to speak on matters of
faith to any congregation?
Roger Williams, a man ahead of his times, believed that the
separation of church and state would protect both institutions; but
it is nothing new in the annals of history for secular officials to
align themselves with the religious traditions of their perceived
constituencies and to skew history while they are at it. While Mr.
Lynch and Chief Justice Williams would like to convey that the
Founding Fathers huddled over the Bible or other religious tracts
in designing our government, our colonial predecessors were clearly
more influenced by pagans, such as Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, as
well as the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who were committed
much more to reason than to faith.
To say that the legal system of this country is founded in
Judeo-Christian principles is a statement so broad as to be
meaningless. To be sure, there are numerous stories and examples of
justice and mercy in the Bible, just as there are in the seminal
texts and myths of any religion that has endured and provided
solace to its adherents.
However, one can fairly inquire as to what Judeo-Christian
principles justified the theft of land from Native Americans,
allowed slavery and later Jim Crow, denied the vote to women,
permitted child labor and justified the locking up of
Japanese-Americans for no reason other than the color of their skin
and the land of their ancestors. More currently, what Judeo
Christian principles allow the incarceration of human beings
without charge, without trial and without counsel. What
Judeo-Christian principles support laws that let some people
accumulate vast fortunes, while others work for substandard
wages?
No person and no law in our democracy can stop anyone, including
Attorney General Lynch and Chief Justice Williams, from worshipping
as he or she pleases and holding any religious views they wish.
Moreover, if the attorney general and the chief justice wish to
share with a group of scholars, or any interested members of the
public for that matter, the beliefs and experiences that undergird
their political and legal viewpoints, they are free to do so -- but
not from a pulpit at a religious, quasi-religious or
pseudo religious ceremony. --Stephen J. Fortunato Jr. is a
Rhode Island Superior Court judge.

Complaint Five

In an article in the Providence Journal in the fall of 2007, the following observations were made regarding the retiring Judge Fortunato:

For Fortunato, one controversial decision came in 1994, three years after one-third of Rhode Island’s residents were left for months without access to their savings during the state’s credit-union crisis. Fortunato acquitted Peter A. Nevola, the former head of RISDIC, the now-defunct financial institutions’ insurer, of defrauding his employer of thousands of dollars by lying about his political campaign contributions, saying the state had not met its burden of proof.

But perhaps his most controversial decision came in 1997, when Fortunato overturned his verdict that Monsignor Louis Ward Dunn was
guilty of raping a sexual-abuse victim who had sought counseling from him and ruled that the priest was entitled to a new trial. Some called for the judge’s impeachment. The state Supreme Court later reinstated the conviction. Fortunato, citing Dunn’s “gross physical problems and mental frailties,” sentenced the 79-year-old retired priest, who was in a nursing home, to a 10-year suspended prison sentence and ordered him to register as a sex offender.

The judge’s published commentary pieces sometimes sparked
controversy, too. In 1999, he lashed out at those calling for the
impeachment of President Clinton for having sex with a White House
intern, referring to the affair as “sexual encounters between
consenting adults in the Oval Office” and “the private
sexual adventuring of a president.” Some readers of The
Providence Journal, including a juror who had sat on a case in his
court, wrote in to complain.

When Mary M. Lisi, the new chief judge of the U.S. District Court
in Rhode Island, was being considered for a seat on the federal
court in 1994, Fortunato wrote a letter to Senate Judiciary
Committee Chairman Joseph Biden saying she was unqualified for the
federal trial court.

In a 2004 commentary piece, he lashed out at Rhode Island Chief
Justice Frank J. Williams and Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch for
what he considered to be the inappropriate mingling of religion and
the justice system. That same year, he wrote a national magazine
article questioning the ability of Williams to be fair in his role
as a member of a military review panel that was appointed to hear
appeals from suspected terrorists.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Many times the reason or purpose for events in our life initially escapes us,but I am certain we can find reason and/or purpose in everything that happens!

It takes a short time to learn to exercise power, but a lifetime to learn how to avoid abusing it.

We are no longer a country of laws, we are a country where laws are "creatively interpreted."